Outraged Response To Lion Death Needs To Stop

The outraged response to a lion death needs to stop, plain and simple. There is right and wrong in this situation, but it goes on both sides: the accused and the accusers.

The media has been blowing up lately with the world’s response to the way Walter Palmer, an American dentist, killed Cecil, Zimbabwe’s most famous lion, who was found roaming the edge of Hwange National Park.

Since that time, Palmer has been assaulted by the media and everyone around him, calling him a multitude of names including “sub-human,” “killer,” and even “Satan.”

Even celebrities have weighed in on the assault of a man who made a single mistake. Paper Towns star Cara Delevingne called him”a poor excuse of a human being,” and Mia Farrow tweeted out the dentist’s address, potentially putting the man in danger from activists.

This outraged response over the lion’s death needs to stop. Society has taken to compare the life of an animal to a human being. One angry writer even went so far as to compare the lion’s death to humans.

“Killing a single lion in 2015 is mathematically equivalent to murdering 400,000 of the planet’s roughly eight billion people. And because Cecil’s six cubs will likely be killed by the next male to take over the pride, Palmer’s wayward arrow and days-later mercy shot may be as devastating to the lion population as the death of three million people would be to humanity.”

That escalated quickly, didn’t it? We just compared killing one animal to killing hundreds of thousands of people. That doesn’t seem like a very equal comparison, does it?

This incident has ruined a man’s life. He lost his business and is now hunted like the very animal he shot. People have celebrated the close of his business and the destruction of his life by partying and setting up a memorial in front of the closed dental office. How far has the world sunk that we are now celebrating the destruction of a man’s life instead of pitying him or feeling sorrow for the situation as a whole?

It’s true that killing a lion so that you can mount the head over your mantle is not a good cause. It’s foul and disgusting. But it was entirely legal for him to be out hunting lions, even though he made a mistake and shot the wrong one. It’s not something the whole world needs to be angry about. It’s certainly not something that Jimmy Kimmel needs to be crying about on live television.

Do we all need to be a little more environmentally responsible? Yes. Is killing a lion for sport considered a moral wrong? Probably. Do we need to ruin a man’s life over this and have him blacklisted, hated, and bullied wherever he goes? Absolutely not.

Society needs to calm down over this whole situation. Palmer has made his apologies. He has expressed profound regret for what he has done. And now this outraged response to a lion’s death needs to move on.

[Image via Dallas News]